Korea Notes

North Korea's Kim Jong Un continues to generate dangerous propaganda which yesterday moved up the danger needle. Most Americans are not aware but for the last several years the two Koreas have been cooperating in the creation and operation of the Kaesong Industrial Zone, a special place in North Korean territory, just over the DMZ, in which some 50,000 workers from the North have jobs in factories operated by companies from the South.

'Best Jobs In North Korea' Pay $62 A Month; Now They're Diplomatic Pawnsby Mark Memmott  April 03, 201312:

This NPR report from yesterday tells the details.

At an industrial park where they build appliances and other products for companies from South Korea, 55,000 North Koreans typically earn about $62 each a month, a North Korea expert tells NPR. 

And they've got some of the best jobs in one of the world's poorest nations, Aidan Foster-Carter from Leeds University said on All Things Considered this week. Per capita income in the North is estimated to be as little as $1,000 a year. Not only is the pay at the Kaesong Industrial Complex better than elsewhere (other estimatesput it as high as $100 a month), but the workers are "reasonably well-looked after," Foster-Carter said. 

Now those jobs and what's done at the Kaesong complex are in the international spotlight. On Wednesday, North Korean authorities blocked trucks and workers coming from the South to the complex about six miles inside North Korea. 

As NPR's Louisa Lim told Morning Edition, North Korea's regime is skilled at "this sort of cycle of threats" — particularly at times, such as now, when the U.S. and South Korea are holding joint military exercises. 

So, along with threats to fire missiles as the South and the U.S., leader Kim Jong Un and his generals have also shown their displeasure by cutting one of the last ties between North and South — the access given to companies from the South to workers at the Kaesong complex. 

Experts hope the move is just the latest in decades of rhetoric from the North and that South Korean companies will have access to Kaesong again soon.
Meanwhile, here's more about the complex: 

— The project was launched in 2003 in the hope it would both provide much-needed income for those in the North and build better relations with the South. Work began there the next year, according to Foster-Carter. Now, reports the BBC, there are 123 companies from the South with operations in the complex.
— Along with small appliances, the companies with operations in the complex make clothing, textiles, car parts and semiconductors. About $470 million worth of goods were produced there last year, the BBC says.
— Everything made there is exported to the South.
— The South Korean government has not only given companies incentives to put operations at Kaesong, it has also made available "political risk insurance" to cover any losses if North-South relations sour further.
— About 800 South Koreans are at the complex most workdays.
— A "Mr. Kim ... [who] asked that his full name not be used," is a manager for a South Korean sportswear company that employs about 950 North Koreans at the complex. "The skill and labor intensity of workers at Kaesong is far better than we could get in China or Vietnam," he tells The Wall Street Journal. "They're disciplined, hard workers and of course language is no problem."

Closing off this place happened before in 2009. It was reopened a few weeks later.
A commentator at one newsgroup to which I subscribe summarized North Korea's behavior as

North Korea blusters, then talks, then gets aid. It's a ritual for them.
Now we have a new, young leader, I see speculation that he has something to
prove with the old guard.

That acurately summarizes the last several decades of diplomatic history.in a nutshell.  And everyone hopes this time will not be different. But with a third generation tyrant in charge there is no way to know what crazy moves he may make. The whole world watches as a second-generation tyrant in Syria clearly has no compunction about presiding over a bloody civil war. And the fates of others in the former Yugoslavia, North Africa and the Middle East are not reassuring. Traveling, reading and studying in Europe or America seem to have done nothing to ameliorate the effects of a fundamental moral depravity. There is no reason to imagine that Kim Jong Un is importantly different.

One disturbing development could be cyber-tinkering from young renegades who seem not to know or care that no matter how flat they think the Web has made the world, Asia remains very different from the West. If Western adventures in Vietnam and Afghanistan have demonstrated no other realities, those two recent examples should end the argument. (Colonial adventures on the part of Britain, France and Holland, and the protracted Russian quagmire in Afghanistan also failed to penetrate hard Western heads as well. The old grim joke is that wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography.)

My Army assignment when I was drafted in 1965 was as a Medical Corpsman in Korea. I enjoyed my time there so much that I took advantage of an extended tour (from 13 to 16 months) in return for an early release. I was assigned to a small medical detachment near Taejon all of 1966 and half of 1967 and spent all my off-duty time with Koreans, teaching English conversation to a group of high school students and as well as a small group of doctors and nurses anticipating working in America. Korea became for me an adopted country. And I had the impression while I was there that without the US presence the South might even have attacked the North.

Much has changed since then, but I have no reason to believe that Koreans on either side of the DMZ think in terms of two countries as we do in the West. That reality was underscored for me by something that happened when I received my permanent assignment to Camp Ames. Upon my arrival I was sent to the 21st Evac Hospital near Inchon for on-the-job training as an X-Ray tech, much of which was done by a couple of Korean civilian x-ray technicians employed there. When my orders came I didn't know where Taejon was and a Mr. Cho, one of them, took a piece of paper and said "Here, I'll show you."
He sketched an outline map and said, "This is Korea."
" And this," he continued as he drew a line through it, "is DMZ."

Immediately I realized that until that moment when I heard the word Korea I had been thinking of what is properly called the Republic of Korea (ROK), not what we call North Korea, which most Americans regard as a different country, properly called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). They share the same language, culture, customs, names and several thousand years of history as one people.  There is no way that one or two generations of separation will change those fundamental realities in any meaningful way. We need look no further than a divided Germany -- indeed the aftermath of our own Civil War -- to grasp that simple truth.  At my old blog I made a note that in 2005 that sentiment was still alive. 

A poll by the Munhwa Ilbo and KSOI revealed that the South Korean public was strongly opposed to unilateral U.S. military action against North Korea. How opposed, you might ask? When asked what the South Korean government should do if the U.S. bombed the North without Seoul’s approval, only 31.2 percent said the South should stand with the U.S., while 47.6 percent said Seoul should take the North’s side. Even among conservative Grand National Party supporters, only 38.6 percent responded that Seoul should take the U.S. side, while 41.1 percent said Seoul should stand with Pyongyang. Support for the North was higher in all regional, age and class groups.

This is consistent with a survey given on February 13, when 56 percent of respondents said the solution to the nuclear issue was for the “U.S. to guarantee North Korea’s system (regime).” 74 percent said “North Korea needed to be persuaded” to give up its nukes, while only 23 percent said North Korea needed to be pressured.

I have learned not to make predictions. So when I read about political posturing and military maneuvers I take it all with several grains of salt until something substantive takes place. And despite Wikileaks, Truth Out, and the Anonymous group of hackers I still believe there are adults in charge who know more than they are telling.  Some measure of secrecy has always been vital to our national security.
(Every time I hear another reference to what may or may not have happened in Benghazi I roll my eyes and wonder if the people who keep up that theme have any idea what they are demanding. Do they really want an even more revealing level of transparency on the part of the State Department, the CIA or the military? Would they have everybody running around naked, caring nothing for anything they say or do? But I digress.)

Here are links to my old blog regarding a hostage crisis that happened in 2007 when some Korean Christian missionaries to Afghanistan were taken hostage by the Taliban.

Korean Hostages of the Taliban in Afghanistan (Added links)
Korean Hostages of the Taliban -- Day 27
Korean Hostages Update
Pray for the Korean Hostages

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I heard an NPR feature Monday (no, it wasn't an April Fools Day joke) about recent research that a group of investigators is doing on word analysis.

Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century

Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad? 

To find out, you'd have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature. 

Several years ago, more or less on a lark, a group of researchers from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close to a billion words in millions of books. 

This effort began simply with lists of "emotion" words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research. 

The original idea was to have the computer program track the use of these words over time. The researchers wanted to see if certain words, at certain moments, became more popular. 

[...]  "Generally speaking, the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century," Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness and joy and anger and disgust and surprise. 

In fact, there is only one exception that Bentley and his colleagues found: fear. "The fear-related words start to increase just before the 1980s," he says. 

So what does this tell us? Should we trust it? Could it be that our own sense of ourselves, and how emotionally open we are, is somehow wrong? Bentley says he has no explanation. "We were just so surprised at this result that we just wanted to publish it to show people," he says. "It's such a fascinating thing; I'm excited just to hear other people's interpretations of this data."

Not to put too fine a point on it, this strikes me as both accurate and credible. I have seen the growth of fear, culturally speaking,  all my life. I can recall as a child being vaguely aware of a Communist conspiracy. I didn't know what it meant. I was only six or seven years old. But I remember one of my aunts who lived in a duplex at the time asking her husband, my uncle, if he thought their next-door neighbor who was from Russia was one of them. She was a born worrier. She worried about everything, enough that nobody had to worry on their own. But fortunately  Uncle Ralph was more even-tempered and he blew it off and said she was just a sweet, harmless old lady and there was nothing to worry about. But I never forgot the fear to which my aunt alluded. When you're a child it's unsettling when you see an adult worrying about something.

And just yesterday I came across all the evidence I need that a large and growing number of Americans, whether or not they admit it, are in the grips of fear.
How else to explain this?

666 Pennsylvania Avenue
By Ed Kilgore, April 03, 2013

Since we’ve been talking off and on about the boundary-line that separates regular conservatives from the extremist fringe, and also because one of my regular topics is the intersection of politics and religion, check out this finding from a new PPP survey on subscription to conspiracy theories: 

13% of voters think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, including 22% of Romney voters 

This is a national poll, mind you, not a straw poll at some conservative evangelical clambake. Its margin-of-error is 2.8%. Extrapolated to the national electorate, it suggests that over 13 million Americans believe the President of the United States is a demonic supernatural being sent into the world to set up an infernal kingdom until it’s all washed away by the End of Days. 

Now I understand all the limitations of this kind of polling. The Anti-Christ question is sprinkled in with all sorts of crazy questions about this or that odd theory (my favorite is: Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not? 4% of respondents are down with the “V hypothesis,” though the number rises to 11% among those self-identifying as “very conservative.”). Many Romney voters would be inclined to agree with anything negative said about Obama. 

Still, the Anti-Christ? 

Perhaps the second most-alarming result of the survey is that even after the recent heavy publicity about the lies surrounding the Iraq War, 36% of 2012 Romney voters (nearly half of those expressing an opinion) persist in thinking that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. There’s zero evidence of that, of course, but it’s hard to prove negatives to people who want to believe otherwise. 

The PPP survey was conducted from March 27th through March 30, so it’s possible some respondents were influenced at least subliminally by those episodes of the TV miniseries The Bible that depicted Satan as looking more than a little like Barack Obama (and certainly a lot more than Ol’ Scratch resembled Mitt Romney). But any way you slice it, when progressives suggest on occasion that conservatives talk about Obama as though he were the Anti-Christ, it’s not all hyperbole 

UPDATE: On Twitter, TNR’s Nate Cohn reminds me to note that 19% of 2012 Romney voters are unsure whether Obama is the Anti-Christ (guess they are still reading the Book of Revelation and looking for signs). Only 59% are willing to say he’s not.

Nineteen percent unsure? Unsure?
Huh? 

Add that to the hysteria about Second Amendment rights and the flaming mythology about government plans to take away all the guns, buy up all the ammo and round up people in concentration camps and that can only be explained by a serious case of fear. 

Psychiatrists call it paranoia.

If we who imagine ourselves to be free and enlightened -- with access to the Web and the latest news -- who eat freedom for breakfast and have the strongest military machine in the history of mankind, find ourselves in the grips of that level of fear, how much more terrified must the population of North Korea be than we?

Let's hope the policy of strategic patience continues to be effective and that China finds a way to keep their boy in check.

HCR -- Drug Notes

This op-ed in NY Times gets a separate post.

Diagnosis: Human
By Ted Gup

THE news that 11 percent of school-age children now receive a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — some 6.4 million — gave me a chill. My son David was one of those who received that diagnosis. 

In his case, he was in the first grade. Indeed, there were psychiatrists who prescribed medication for him even before they met him. One psychiatrist said he would not even see him until he was medicated. For a year I refused to fill the prescription at the pharmacy. Finally, I relented. And so David went on Ritalin, then Adderall, and other drugs that were said to be helpful in combating the condition. 

In another age, David might have been called “rambunctious.” His battery was a little too large for his body. And so he would leap over the couch, spring to reach the ceiling and show an exuberance for life that came in brilliant microbursts. 

As a 21-year-old college senior, he was found on the floor of his room, dead from a fatal mix of alcohol and drugs. The date was Oct. 18, 2011. 

No one made him take the heroin and alcohol, and yet I cannot help but hold myself and others to account. I had unknowingly colluded with a system that devalues talking therapy and rushes to medicate, inadvertently sending a message that self-medication, too, is perfectly acceptable.
My son was no angel (though he was to us) and he was known to trade in Adderall, to create a submarket in the drug among his classmates who were themselves all too eager to get their hands on it. What he did cannot be excused, but it should be understood. What he did was to create a market that perfectly mirrored the society in which he grew up, a culture where Big Pharma itself prospers from the off-label uses of drugs, often not tested in children and not approved for the many uses to which they are put. 

And so a generation of students, raised in an environment that encourages medication, are emulating the professionals by using drugs in the classroom as performance enhancers.
And we wonder why it is that they use drugs with such abandon. As all parents learn — at times to their chagrin — our children go to school not only in the classroom but also at home, and the culture they construct for themselves as teenagers and young adults is but a tiny village imitating that to which they were introduced as children. 

The issue of permissive drug use and over-diagnosis goes well beyond hyperactivity. In May, the American Psychiatric Association will publish its D.S.M. 5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is called the bible of the profession. Its latest iteration, like those before, is not merely a window on the profession but on the culture it serves, both reflecting and shaping societal norms. (For instance, until the 1970s, it categorized homosexuality as a mental illness.) 

One of the new, more controversial provisions expands depression to include some forms of grief. On its face it makes sense. The grieving often display all the common indicators of depression — loss of interest in life, loss of appetite, irregular sleep patterns, low functionality, etc. But as others have observed, those same symptoms are the very hallmarks of grief itself. 

Ours is an age in which the airwaves and media are one large drug emporium that claims to fix everything from sleep to sex. I fear that being human is itself fast becoming a condition. It’s as if we are trying to contain grief, and the absolute pain of a loss like mine. We have become increasingly disassociated and estranged from the patterns of life and death, uncomfortable with the messiness of our own humanity, aging and, ultimately, mortality. 

Challenge and hardship have become pathologized and monetized. Instead of enhancing our coping skills, we undermine them and seek shortcuts where there are none, eroding the resilience upon which each of us, at some point in our lives, must rely. Diagnosing grief as a part of depression runs the very real risk of delegitimizing that which is most human — the bonds of our love and attachment to one another. The new entry in the D.S.M. cannot tame grief by giving it a name or a subsection, nor render it less frightening or more manageable. 

The D.S.M. would do well to recognize that a broken heart is not a medical condition, and that medication is ill-suited to repair some tears. Time does not heal all wounds, closure is a fiction, and so too is the notion that God never asks of us more than we can bear. Enduring the unbearable is sometimes exactly what life asks of us. 

But there is a sweetness even to the intensity of this pain I feel. It is the thing that holds me still to my son. And yes, there is a balm even in the pain. I shall let it go when it is time, without reference to the D.S.M., and without the aid of a pill.

Ted Gup is an author and fellow of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Morning Reading -- April 3

My "Morning Reading" blog post experiment appears to be working, at least for me. I'm sure my Facebook timeline looks less cluttered and pedantic to my FB contacts, and yesterday's post received about seventy or more hits according to Google. There is no way to discover how many people look at a Facebook entry so getting any number is more rewarding than getting none at all.  The statistics exist, of course, and are used by Facebook for any number of projects, most of which have to do with tweaking the brand, improving the revenue stream and advancing whatever nefarious agendas Zuckerberg and company has in mind. 

Visitors should know that these notes are published piecemeal. There will be one or two paragraphs or links when first published, but as the morning progresses more content will be added til I get tired.  Checking yesterday's notes is an example -- there are seven separate sections in no particular order.

Thus far the only "comments" here have been my own. Sometimes I'm too lazy to open the edit screen to put something into the post or add a follow-up, so comments are an easy way out.  Readers and visitors are urged to leave feedback and I'll try not to be defensive in my responses.

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Eyeless in Gaza: When will Israel let its People Go?
Juan Cole posts another plea for sanity in the Middle East.

Israeli war planes struck the Palestinian Gaza Strip on Tuesday. Israel has roughly 7.5 million people, Gaza roughly 1.7 million. Israel bombed and destroyed Gaza’s only airport and refuses to let Gaza port operate. It still places severe restrictions on Gaza imports, and lets Palestinians there export almost nothing of what they make. Nearly half of Gaza families were forced out of what became southern Israel by militant Jewish nationalists, and many still live in refugee camps. They could walk home in an hour if allowed to. Instead they are kept in a huge open-air cage. 

Gaza’s population is roughly that of Houston, where 217 people were murdered last year. Gaza’s Palestinians are far, far less violent. A few young militants send tiny home made rockets (not katyushas) over the border and almost never hit anything. (Occasionally they smuggle in a real rocket; but those don’t typically hit much either.) The Israelis justify their air strikes and other actions with reference to what they call terrorism but Palestinians call resistance. Israel offers the Palestinians nothing for making peace, and even punishes the suckers who sometimes negotiate. 

The Israelis have 400 nuclear warheads, a fleet of F16s, and the best military in the region. Palestinians in Gaza have virtually nothing. 

The other big news from Palestine is hunger strikes among Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. It is a good symbol for the situation. The Israelis have kidnapped and jailed the Palestinian population. Palestinian politics and activism is one big prison riot 

What Israeli authorities seem unable to understand is that the Palestinians will never disappear and will never get used to their prison. The F-16 air strikes on a pitifully weak people (often directed at the gulag of Palestinian refugee camps) may make some Israeli officers feel macho. But they just fuel more violence, and aren’t a policy. 

It is true that their captivity to Israel and the poverty imposed on them (they are less well off now than in the 90s) has allowed Muslim fundamentalist HAMAS to come to power there. Desperation does not produce moderation.

Illustrating the point, he continues with belligerent remarks from Ismail Haniya, current Hamas leader, from last Friday, the day when sermons fan the flames of political heat. And he concludes by saying "I don’t care for Hamas or Haniya, but they are a product of an unjust policy. The Palestinian prison riots will end when the captivity of the Palestinian people ends."

Readers need to know that Israel's maltreatment of Palestinians in general and the Gaza population in particular is a broken record with me. I may be just an old guy blogging in retirement but something in me keeps alive the need to peck away at causes that may not be resolved in my lifetime. But I have lived long enough to see many developments I never expected, but I realize that I will die with many more left unfinished.

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North Korea Blocks Southern Workers From Crossing the Border
This is a big story which broke last night. I'm only noting this for the record but nothing I comment here will have any meaning. I learned on NPR this morning that this kind of thing happened in 2009 and was over in three days, so it is not without precedent. It looks like the embarrassing equivalent of a kid holding his breath and turning blue, refusing to eat or cooperate until he gets his way.

Every day hundreds of South Korean workers make their way across a special border crossing to workat a North Korean industrial complex that is jointly run by both nations. But not today. Authorities in the North have shut down the crossing and blocked Southerners from entering, taking their ongoing feud from the level of idle threats to very real action. 

The Kaesong Industrial Complex sits on the North side of the border and is pretty much the only legitimate avenue of partnership between the two nations. Yet, because they've recently made it their mission to antagonize the South at every turn, this move is one of few they have (short of actual war) that can actually hurt their neighbors economically. (But not as much as it hurts the North.) 

Authorities in Pyongyang have shut down the complex before, temporarily preventing some South Korean workers from returning home back in 2009. That standoff lasted less than a week, before operations resumed as normal. The park, which opened in 2004, was financed and built by South Korean businesses (the South even provides the electricity) and in return, gives those firms access to more than 40,000 North Korean workers. It's just a few miles north of the Demilitarized Zone and is connected to the South by special rail and road access.

There were fears that a similar "kidnapping" situation might develop this time, but workers are reportedly being allowed to go home. They're replacements just can't get in. Some companies are keeping their workers there voluntarily to prevent the businesses from shutting down completely.

After nearly a month of back-and-forth statements and various shows of force, the last couple of days have seen a serious increase in tensions on the Korean Peninsula, as the North has moved from mere words to behavior of real concern. On Tuesday, they announced that they would be restarting their mothballed nuclear reactor with the express purpose of making more plutonium fuel for nuclear weapons. That prompted Secretary of State John Kerry to hold a joint press conference with his South Korean counterpart in Washington to state that "the United States will do what is necessary to defend ourselves and defend our allies, Korea and Japan."

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I just came across a well-done book review in the NY Times pointed out by Abbas Raza's gifted sister Azra at 3Quarks Daily.  Read these last three paragraphs and see if you don't agree that they are some of the best prose you have seen lately.

Still, the democratic examination room is a delightfully seductive fantasy. Even writers of medical fiction don’t venture that far. Like Dr. Louise Aronson in “A History of the Present Illness,” they generally stay so firmly grounded in grim reality that their fiction reads like memoir by another name. 

Dr. Aronson, a geriatrician in San Francisco, joins the ranks of those immortalizing the small, realistic details of modern medical care. She offers up the requisite coming-of-age tales of studenthood, residency and disillusioned midcareer, but is at her best in the world of the much too old — the rooms where dyed hair grows out platinum white and small bodies lie in bed “the way a letter lies in its envelope.” 

Dr. Aronson writes lovely, nuanced description; if her dialogue is occasionally a little stiff and some of her plots stretch the bounds of plausibility, it is still worth staying with her: no revolution in sight, just keen, calm observation, punctuated by sighs.

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Happy Easter, Beheaded-Style!
==►Brace yourself, reader, for a case of whiplash from this short post and the link that follows from Brown Pundit.

I don’t have a lot of detailed knowledge about Latin America, but it seems weird to me that the mainstream press in the West continues to focus on AfPak when this is going on right next door! (And, I am not trying to minimize or excuse AfPak violence–these Taliban types are scum.) American “progressives” seem uncomfortable calling “illegal immigrants” by that name–LOL–as a legal immigrant who became a naturalized US citizen I would tend to call them far worse–like, “invaders.” When did the concept of a nation getting invaded go out of style? I guess I missed that by not taking enough humanities classes! I don’t feel particularly “culturally enriched” when I pass by illegal-immigrant heavy neighborhoods–more like harassed and threatened. More Wodehouse, fewer illegals, please! (This would ideally involve limiting Pakistani immigration to the US-I am seeing too many of the sorts I wanted to leave behind wash up on US shores.)

There at the end is a link to Borderland Beat, "Reporting on the Mexican Cartel Drug War." 
It's not even "hot." In order to go to the link it's necessary to copy and paste it into your browser url field.
Maybe this is the writer's way of warning you about graphic content.

Easter Week Ends With 72 Deaths In Four Days
Photos (some grizzly) and fuller descriptions at the link. 

Since the past “Holy Thursday” until the evening of Easter Sunday, at least 72 people were killed in different parts of the country, according to a new overall count of deaths in violent acts by Aristegui Noticias.

Despite the thousands of people who vacationed in tourist zones in the country and the vacation of millions of Mexicans during this season, organized crime did not cede, and the spiral of violence continued.

Most executions occurred in the state of Sinaloa, with at least 16 deaths, followed by Chihuahua with 14, Morelos with 7, Durango with 6, The State of Mexico with 5, and both Guerrero and Jalisco with 4. 

Among the violent events in the country, the one that stands out was the murder of seven people in a bar in Chihuahua on “Holy Thursday”.

This is a comprehensive picture of the various crimes, reported by various local and national media, who are credited and linked to at the end of this article.

Overall, this is an overview of the violent deaths that occurred in various states, since last Thursday leading up to Sunday:

• Sinaloa = 16

• Chihuahua = 14

• Morelos = 7

• Durango = 6

• Estado de México = 5 

• Jalisco = 4 

• Guerrero = 4 

• Nuevo León = 3 

• Michoacán = 3 

• Tijuana = 3 

• San Luis Potosí = 1 

• Quintana Roo = 1 

• Guanajuato = 1 

• Sonora = 1 

• Tabasco = 1 

• Coahuila = 1 

• DF = 1

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A Doctor Confides, “My Primary Doc is a Nurse”

Okay, this is another important post by Maggie Mahar.

No, I haven't read it yet in detail -- only scanned for the general message. But this is recommended reading for anyone following the subject of healthcare reform.

Maggie Mahar is the author of Money-Driven Medicine which made me a fan and believer several years ago. She is not someone of few words. I put this into a Word document and found it runs to nearly three and  a half thousand words. But she leaves nothing to chance and what she says you may take to the bank. 

Regarding the subject, I am totally in favor of advancing the cause of nurse practicioners as primary care "physicians." I know doctors get paneezinawad over terms like doctor and physician, but that's secondary to the point. If the out of countrol costs of health care in America are to get under control, and especially since great swaths of our population never go to a doctor until facing a medical emergency, a growing role for nurse practitioners strikes me as a no-brainer. 

Last week I interviewed a doctor who told me that his primary care doc is a “physician’s assistant” –a nurse who has been trained to deliver primary care. He said it casually, dropping the fact into a long conversation. 

Dr. David Kauff is an internist at Seattle’s Group Health Cooperative (GHC), an organization that has a fabulous reputation–both among patients and among physicians—for its primary care program. One reason is that at Group Health, doctors, physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners work together in teams. “The success of our model is based on the fact that everyone in this together; we are corralled by a common purpose,” says Kauff, who also serves as GHC’s Medical Director for Practice and Leadership.

I’ll be writing more about Group Health Cooperative in a few days. 

In this post, I would like to focus on the growing role of Nurse Practitioners (NP’s) and Physician’s Assistants (PA’s) as clinicians. NPS are registered nurses who have gone on to earn a master’s or a doctorate. Some specialize in areas such as anesthesiology, pediatrics (pediatric nurses) or Ob-Gyn (certified nurse-midwives). NP’s can run clinics; some run their own practices.

By contrast, physicians’ assistants (PA’s) don’t work alone. But they, too, are formally trained to provide diagnostic, therapeutic, and preventive health care services, as delegated by a physician. They take medical histories, examine and treat patients, order and interpret laboratory tests and X- rays, make diagnoses and treat minor injuries. 

Currently, 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, let nurse practitioners operate independently. In 33 states regulations vary. As this map reveals, in some places NPs are not allowed to prescribe medication. In others, they may have to consult with a physician when treating patients. 

It’s worth noting that NPs enjoy greater freedom in the Northwest, the Upper Middle West, and Northern New England (areas that some healthcare reformers refer to as “Canada South” because these states are in the vanguard of reform) as well as in the Southwest, where many NP’s started working in group practices, and they went out and established their own clinics. Nationwide, about 6,000 nurses operate independent primary-care practices.

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Muppets Co-Creator Jane Henson Has Died Jane Henson, the woman who helped create and bring the Muppets to the world stage and carried those furry puppets through history, died in her Connecticut home on Tuesday after a battle with cancer. She was 78.

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Cairo Airport will be pushing passengers out of planes at low altitude to save fuel costs of landing and taking off again.
— sherief gaber (@cairocitylimits) April 3, 2013

I know nothing about Sherief Gaber but his Twitter followers include half a dozen people I follow.
This is what I found from a search.
I have been an avid observer of events in Egypt for the last two years.

Sherief Gaber is a twenty six year old graduate student at the University of Texas studying law and urban planning. He grew up in Memphis and went to college in Saint Louis. His parents came to America from Egypt shortly before he was born.
Growing up, Sherief visited Egypt many times, going to see his family and friends who live there. After college, Sherief decided to move to Egypt for a while. He studied in Egypt for a year and a half, before coming to Texas, where he has lived for the last five years.
Recently, Sherief Gaber returned to Egypt to witness and take part in the protests and demonstrations going on there. He stayed with friends and family for two and a half weeks. Sherief was also featured in an ABC newscast that followed his story in Egypt.
Sherief is Egyptian-American, which accounts for his dark skin. He has brown eyes and black hair, and is tall.

Morning Reading -- April 2

I'm tired of posting links and comments on Facebook and Twitter retweets as a way of "sharing" with... heck, who knows?  I don't know the ratio, but one or two responses from every two or three dozen "shares" is a pretty thin ROI (return on investment). At least with my new blog I can go back and find items that caught my attention and scan them later when they get cold. Most, of course, will be obsolete. But at least they won't vanish in the unsearchable quagmires of Facebook and Twitter.

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The 'Financial Times' Has a Secret Weapon: Data

At a time when newspapers and magazines are struggling to remain profitable, FT is finding that subscription revenue is more important than advertising.

The FT enjoys a distinguished role in the sphere of financial news publications, namely for its commentary on UK and European markets and businesses, as well, of course, for the salmon pink tint of its print newspaper. Headquartered in London and edited by Lionel Barber, it employs more than 600 journalists worldwide and has an average daily readership of 2.1 million, a little less than theWall Street Journal (though a subscription is about a quarter more expensive).

The paper finished 2012 with a record paid circulation of 602,000, up 28% from five years ago. For the first time, the number of digital subscriptions surpassed print at 316,000 versus 286,000. 

Despite the increase in FT subscriptions — which start at $352 per year for digital-only access — the FT Group is only thinly profitable: Last year, the Group (a division that includes the FT as well as intelligence service Mergermarket and a 50% stake in The Economist Group, among other holdings) reported 11% operating profit on revenues of $568 million. In November, Bloomberg reportedthe division was up sale, but parent company Pearson quickly and repeatedlydenied the report. 

Since advertisers can no longer support them, publishers have looked to readers for revenue growth and profit, sparking the rapid adoption of online paywalls beginning with the New York Times in 2011. The Alliance for Audited Media estimates that nearly half of U.S. newspapers now have some sort of paywall or metered access model. 

The FT was well ahead of this trend, introducing a metered access model in 2007. Today, subscriptions make up more than half of the FT Group's revenue, while advertising only accounts for 39%, down from 52% in 2008. At the FTspecifically, advertising once made up as much as 70% of yearly revenue. This year, the paper expects to generate more money from subscriptions than from advertising. 

"That's a big deal in the transformation of our business model," John Ridding, CEO of the FT, said in a sit-down interview at Pearson's U.S. headquarters last month. Ridding (pictured top) joined the FT from the editorial side, reporting abroad from Paris and Korea before taking on a series of executive positions, including editor and publisher of FT Asia. He was named chief executive of the paper in 2006, assuming the CEO role of the entire FT Group for the first time this month. 

I asked Ridding how the FT was able to increase its subscriber levels by more than a quarter in the last five years. "It's sort of a combination of art and science," he says. "Five or six years ago we started a new media model, charging for access through a metered system. When we started doing that, it was primarily to build a revenue stream online, but probably what was more important over time was the data and customer insight that that gave us. That's what transformed the business," he says. 

Looking through some of the reader data — the FT's data team now numbers more than 30 across three groups — the FT was able to recognize the kinds of patterns readers display before purchasing subscriptions. "We would see the sort of articles they were reading and the frequency they were reading those articles, for instance, and we began to map those," Ridding explains. "People do behave in predictable ways." 

[...]

"The FT has been around 125 years, and a lot of the process and structure that has built up over that time no longer reflects the needs of our readers," Ridding observes. "The core of our 'digital first' initiative is really moving resources to front-end digital editing and publishing. We're moving more staff from nighttime to daytime, deploying our energy and resources and at the times our readers want it." 

As part of a move away from this cycle, Lionel Barber, editor of the FT, announced in January that 25 staff positions would be eliminated, and 10 more people would be hired to fill digital roles. In a memo e-mailed to staff, Barber said the FT needs to serve a digital platform first, and a newspaper second. 

That doesn't mean the FT is moving towards becoming a 24/7 wire service. "We're never going to be a wire service, that's not our job, not what makes us different and special," says Ridding. "Nevertheless, I think what people want is to go to any of our channels at any time, and find what the editorial brain thinks is the most significant story at that time." He adds, "Things evolve and change and happen during the business day. We have to be reflecting those changes."
To help deliver on that mission, the FT is planning to release a new online section called "Fast FT," which will provide real-time market commentary around the clock. Ridding emphasizes (again) that it's not a wire service, seeking instead to deliver analysis and context to the news, not just the news itself.

More at the link, but that's the meat of the article. 

Thanks to a Jay Rosen Twitter message for the link.

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How robust is French secularism if it can't even tolerate headscarves? This is petty and irrational. m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…
— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) April 2, 2013

The debate about Islamic headscarves which gripped France in 2004 has been reignited by a controversial court ruling.
President Francois Hollande, a Socialist, has backed cross-party moves for further curbs on headscarves.
Muslims have reacted with dismay to demands for a new law, which followed a ruling by France's highest court of appeal last month.
France has the largest number of Muslims in western Europe - estimated at between five and six million.

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The racket with standardized test scores

Washington Post op-ed by Eugene Robinson. All the gory details of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal and it's national policy implications.

It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform — requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores — is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket. 

I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta public schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses. Hall, who retired two years ago, is also accused of theft, conspiracy and making false statements. She has denied any wrongdoing. 

Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers. 

In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall “National Superintendent of the Year” for improvement in student achievement that seemed, in retrospect, much too good to be true. On Georgia’s standardized competency test, students in some of Atlanta’s troubled neighborhoods appeared to vault past their counterparts in the wealthy suburbs. 

For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores. “Principals and teachers were frequently told by Beverly Hall and her subordinates that excuses for not meeting targets would not be tolerated,” according to the indictment. 

But there was a sure-fire way to meet those targets: After a day of testing, teachers allegedly were told to gather the students’ test sheets and change the answers. Suddenly a failing school would become a model of education reform. The principal and teachers would get bonuses. Hall would get accolades, plus a much bigger bonus. And students — duped into thinking they had mastered material that they hadn’t even begun to grasp — would get the shaft. 

State education officials became suspicious. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote probing stories. There seemed to be no way to legitimately explain the dramatic improvement in test scores at some schools in such a short time, or the statistically improbable number of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets. But there was no proof. 

Sonny Perdue was Georgia’s governor at the time, and in August 2010 he ordered a blue-ribbon investigation. Hall resigned shortly before the release of the investigators’ report, which alleged that 178 teachers and principals cheated over nearly a decade — and that Hall either knew or should have known. Those findings laid the foundation for Friday’s grand jury indictment. 

My Post colleague Valerie Strauss, a veteran education reporter and columnist, wrote Friday that while there have been “dozens” of alleged cheating episodes around the country, only Atlanta’s has been aggressively and thoroughly investigated. “We don’t really know” how extensive the problem is, Strauss wrote, but “what we do know is that these cheating scandals have been a result of test-obsessed school reform.” 

In the District of Columbia, for example, there are unanswered questions about an anomalous pattern of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets during the reign of famed schools reformer Michelle Rhee, who starred in the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” and graced the cover of Time magazine. 

Our schools desperately need to be fixed. But creating a situation in which teachers are more likely than students to cheat cannot be the right path. 

Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets. I totally reject the idea that students from underprivileged neighborhoods cannot learn. Of course they can. But how does it help these students to have their performance on a one-size-fits-all standardized test determine their teachers’ compensation and job security? The clear incentive is for the teacher to focus on test scores rather than actual teaching. 

Not every school system will become so mired in an alleged pattern of wrongdoing that officials can be charged under a racketeering statute of the kind usually used to prosecute mobsters. But even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals. It reduces students to the leavings of a No. 2 pencil. 

School reform cannot be something that ostensibly smart, ostentatiously tough “superstar” superintendents do to a school system and the people who depend on it. Reform has to be something that is done with a community of teachers, students and parents — with honesty and, yes, a bit of old-fashioned humility.

This issue relates obliquely with the question of charter schools, whether they be totally handed over to some "private" entity or some hybrid public-private arrangement.  The purpose of education is not to make everybody as smart as everybody else, but to give everybody the resources they need to be responsible, constructive members of society.
Plenty of stupid people are really good citizens. They report to work and do a good job every day. They pay their bills. They are responsible parents and neighbors. And they form long lines at places where they need to stand patiently with others to buy their groceries, renew their drivers licenses or vote. America is not a technocracy. Nor would it be a better place if it were.
And I despise the term meritocracy. It's one of the snobbiest words in our vocabulary.
The metric of grades is just as mean-spirited and misplaced as the metric of wealth. And I think we all know examples of people of modest wealth, with good hearts, leading responsible lives whom we would be pleased to have as neighbors.

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Mutating Gonorrhea and 'Superbugs' Coming Soon to a Town Near You?to.pbs.org/16h0stZ
— hari sreenivasan (@hari) April 2, 2013

==►  Fidelity has it's rewards. 

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GOP rebranding: twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/…
— TheObamaDiary.com (@TheObamaDiary) April 2, 2013

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The cost of the Obama plan on brain research is $100 million, not $100 billion as reported by some news outlets
— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) April 2, 2013

And this is why I follow Jamie Dupree. Bless his heart, he gets paid by WSB and has a blog at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, both of which stay in business catering to one of the country's most retrograde Conservative audiences.
And here is a journalist who has been toiling away for years -- decades, even -- bending over backward to be truly non-partisan. When everybody else has gone home for drinks and a movie, he's sometimes grinding away, looking at the tedious language of Congressional bills even before they have make it out of committee.
 And he has the added challenge of interacting with the likes of Herman Cain and Neal Bootz on live radio without making them appear stupid. The man must be a saint. 

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The Tame Geese -- A parable by Søren Kierkegaard
(by Søren Kierkegaard, from A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited by Robert Bretall, p. 433)

Suppose it was so that the geese could talk — then they had so arranged it that they also could have their religious worship, their divine service. 

Every Sunday they came together, and once of the ganders preached. 

The essential content of the sermon was: what a lofty destiny the geese had, what a high goal the Creator (and every time this word was mentioned the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed the head) had set before the geese; by the aid of wings they could fly away to distant regions, blessed climes, where properly they were at home, for here they were only strangers.
So it was every Sunday. And as soon as the assembly broke up each waddled home to his own affairs. And then the next Sunday again to divine worship and then again home — and that was the end of it. 

That was the end of it. For though the discourse sounded so lofty on Sunday, the geese on Monday were ready to recount to one another what befell a goose that had wanted to make serious use of the wings the Creator had given him, designed for the high goal that was proposed to him — what befell him, what a terrible death he encountered. This the geese could talk about knowingly among themselves. But, naturally, to speak about it on Sundays was unseemly; for, said they, it would then become evident that our divine worship is really only making a fool of God and of ourselves. 

Among the geese there were, however, some individuals which seemed suffering and grew thin. About them it was currently said among the geese: There you see what it leads to when flying is taken seriously. For because their hearts are occupied with the thought of wanting to fly, therefore they become thin, do not thrive, do not have the grace of God as we have who therefore become plump and delicate. 

And so the next Sunday they went again to divine worship, and the old gander preached about the high goal the Creator (here again the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed the head) had set before the geese, whereto the wings were designed. 

So with the divine worship of Christendom…

And a commentary...

Why didn't the geese fly?

After hearing and understanding such a powerful message about the opportunities available to them, they seemed to ignore it. They didn't fly home. The message made no impact on their lives. They continued to do what they had always done. They waddled home.

Why, when there were so many good reasons to change, didn't the geese fly?

It seems a part of the human condition that we don't always do what we know we should. We don't always act in our own best interest, even when we know better. In fact, we sometimes even deliberately do things that we know we are going to end up paying for in the long run. We might call this phenomenon theAmazing Action Anomaly. That is, people most often know what it is they should be doing but usually choose to ignore or act in contradiction to either their strongest instincts or to reality. Although, it makes no sense, we continue to waddle.

Roubini on the Global Economy

My first awareness of Nouriel Roubini was in 2008 as the US and global economies fell into the toilet. His current assessment of the world economy in a moment but first a little history.

Memories fade with time and few people now recall, just five years later, the level of panic that seized the country and leadership of both political parties in 2008-9.  Later came the days of  stimulus packages and Rahm Emmanuel's famous "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste."  But most people have now forgotten that Barack Obama may have been elected in November but he didn't become president until the following January. Meantime a lame duck Congress was gasping for leadership like the rest of the country and the president-elect instantly closed ranks with his electoral adversaries to insure that everybody in the capital was speaking one message: The country is facing an economic crisis and we must move quickly and decisively to avert disaster.  The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) had been pushed through Congress at lightening fast speed in response to the sub-prime lending crisis bubble and signed into law by President Bush in October, even before the election was final.  And Obama was tossed into the boiling mess even before he took the oath of office. The Wikipedia timeline at TARP is instructive.

On October 14, 2008,  [Remember, the election was still in progress...] Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and President Bush separately announced revisions to the TARP program. The Treasury announced their intention to buy senior preferred stock and warrants from the nine largest American banks. The shares would qualify as Tier 1 capital and were non-voting shares. To qualify for this program, the Treasury required participating institutions to meet certain criteria...
[...]
The first allocation of the TARP money was primarily used to buy preferred stock, which is similar to debt in that it gets paid before common equity shareholders. This has led some economists to argue that the plan may be ineffective in inducing banks to lend efficiently.
[...]
On November 12, 2008, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson indicated that reviving the securitization market for consumer credit would be a new priority in the second allotment.
On December 19, 2008, President Bush used his executive authority to declare that TARP funds may be spent on any program that Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson, deemed necessary to alleviate the financial crisis.
On December 31, 2008, the Treasury issued a report reviewing Section 102, the Troubled Assets Insurance Financing Fund, also known as the "Asset Guarantee Program." The report indicated that the program would likely not be made "widely available."
On January 15, 2009, the Treasury issued interim final rules for reporting and record keeping requirements under the executive compensation standards of the Capital Purchase Program (CPP).
On January 21, 2009, the Treasury announced new regulations regarding disclosure and mitigation of conflicts of interest in its TARP contracting.
On February 5, 2009, the Senate approved changes to the TARP that prohibited firms receiving TARP funds from paying bonuses to their 25 highest-paid employees. The measure was proposed by Christopher Dodd of Connecticut as an amendment to the $900 billion economic stimulus act then waiting to be passed.
On February 10, 2009, the newly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner outlined his plan to use the remaining $300 billion or so in TARP funds. He intended to direct $50 billion towards foreclosure mitigation and use the rest to help fund private investors to buy toxic assets from banks. Nevertheless, this highly anticipated speech coincided with a nearly 5 percent drop in the S&P 500 and was criticized for lacking details.
On March 23, 2009, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced a Public-Private Investment Program (P-PIP) to buy toxic assets from banks' balance sheets.
[...]
On April 19, 2009, the Obama administration outlined the conversion of Banks Bailouts to Equity Share.

I will never forget that as the global magnitude of this crisis unfolded that Conservative talk radio and the newly-hatched Tea Party anti-tax movement was propagating the idea that the main problem causing all the trouble was government handouts to lazy people in return for votes. The message: government, by encouraging banks to lend poor people at sub-prime rates, caused the housing bubble. The Community Reinvestment Act was cited repeatedly as though it had just come into being, despite the fact that it began in 1977 as an effort to curb red-lining of poor neighborhoods by lending institutions. Even after it became clear that places with the most dramatic run-up in speculation had no poor people, the myth survived that government give-away policies were at the core of the crisis. And to this day -- in the same way that most Americans have no idea that there was no connection between Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center, or that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq prior to the US invasion -- many people lay the blame for the crisis of 2008 at the feet of Barack Obama and "government spending."

The longer I live the more I am amazed at the depth of public ignorance about these and many historical realities.

But back to Roubini.

C-SPAN's Washington Journal had Roubini as a guest in 2008 and I recall at least two callers thanking him for advising people to get out of the stock market the previous year, warning that a serious economic problem was coming. His nickname had been (and still is) "Doctor Doom" because he always sees the downside of what might be coming. But after 2008 he became a rock star in the world of economics and has remained there ever since.  Here he is at that time as a guest on C-SPAN with his frumpy-looking necktie and monotone delivery, the image of a NYU academic.
But pay attention to what he is saying.




With that background, here is what Nouriel Roubini says now in his assessment of the world economy.

The Global Economy on the Fly
Author: Nouriel Roubini  April 1st, 2013 

In the last four weeks, I have traveled to Sofia, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, London, Milan, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Istanbul, and throughout the United States. As a result, the myriad challenges facing the global economy were never far away. 

In Europe, the tail risk of a eurozone break-up and a loss of market access by Spain and Italy were reduced by last summer’s decision by the European Central Bank to backstop sovereign debt. But the monetary union’s fundamental problems – low potential growth, ongoing recession, loss of competitiveness, and large stocks of private and public debt – have not been resolved. 

Moreover, the grand bargain between the eurozone core, the ECB, and the periphery – painful austerity and reforms in exchange for large-scale financial support – is now breaking down, as austerity fatigue in the eurozone periphery runs up against bailout fatigue in core countries like Germany and the Netherlands. 

Austerity fatigue in the periphery is clearly evident from the success of anti-establishment forces in Italy’s recent election; large street demonstrations in Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere; and now the botched bailout of Cypriot banks, which has fueled massive public anger. Throughout the periphery, populist parties of the left and right are gaining ground. 

Meanwhile, Germany’s insistence on imposing losses on bank creditors in Cyprus is the latest symptom of bailout fatigue in the core. Other core eurozone members, eager to limit the risks to their taxpayers, have similarly signaled that creditor “bail-ins” are the way of the future.
Outside the eurozone, even the United Kingdom is struggling to restore growth, owing to the damage caused by front-loaded fiscal-consolidation efforts, while anti-austerity sentiment is also mounting in Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. 

In China, the leadership transition has occurred smoothly. But the country’s economic model remains, as former Premier Wen Jiabao famously put it, “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” 

China’s problems are many: regional imbalances between its coastal regions and the interior, and between urban and rural areas; too much savings and fixed investment, and too little private consumption; growing income and wealth inequality; and massive environmental degradation, with air, water, and soil pollution jeopardizing public health and food safety. 

The country’s new leaders speak earnestly of deepening reforms and rebalancing the economy, but they remain cautious, gradualist, and conservative by inclination. Moreover, the power of vested interests that oppose reform – state-owned enterprises, provincial governments, and the military, for example – has yet to be broken. As a result, the reforms needed to rebalance the economy may not occur fast enough to prevent a hard landing when, by next year, an investment bust materializes. 

In China – and in Russia (and partly in Brazil and India) – state capitalism has become more entrenched, which does not bode well for growth. Overall, these four countries (the BRICs) have been over-hyped, and other emerging economies may do better in the next decade: Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia in Asia; Chile, Colombia, and Peru in Latin America; and Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Poland in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. 

Farther East, Japan is trying a new economic experiment to stop deflation, boost economic growth, and restore business and consumer confidence. “Abenomics” has several components: aggressive monetary stimulus by the Bank of Japan; a fiscal stimulus this year to jump start demand, followed by fiscal austerity in 2014 to rein in deficits and debt; a push to increase nominal wages to boost domestic demand; structural reforms to deregulate the economy; and new free-trade agreements – starting with the Trans-Pacific Partnership – to boost trade and productivity. 

But the challenges are daunting. It is not clear if deflation can be beaten with monetary policy; excessive fiscal stimulus and deferred austerity may make the debt unsustainable; and the structural-reform components of Abenomics are vague. Moreover, tensions with China over territorial claims in the East China Sea may adversely affect trade and foreign direct investment. 

Then there is the Middle East, which remains an arc of instability from the Maghreb to Pakistan. Turkey – with a young population, high potential growth, and a dynamic private sector – seeks to become a major regional power. But Turkey faces many challenges of its own. Its bid to join the European Union is currently stalled, while the eurozone recession dampens its growth. Its current-account deficit remains large, and monetary policy has been confusing, as the objective of boosting competitiveness and growth clashes with the need to control inflation and avoid excessive credit expansion. 

Moreover, while rapprochement with Israel has become more likely, Turkey faces severe tensions with Syria and Iran, and its Islamist ruling party must still prove that it can coexist with the country’s secular political tradition. 

In this fragile global environment, has America become a beacon of hope? The US is experiencing several positive economic trends: housing is recovering; shale gas and oil will reduce energy costs and boost competitiveness; job creation is improving; rising labor costs in Asia and the advent of robotics and automation are underpinning a manufacturing resurgence; and aggressive quantitative easing is helping both the real economy and financial markets 

But risks remain. Unemployment and household debt remain stubbornly high. The fiscal drag from rising taxes and spending cuts will hit growth, and the political system is dysfunctional, with partisan polarization impeding compromise on the fiscal deficit, immigration, energy policy, and other key issues that influence potential growth. 

In sum, among advanced economies, the US is in the best relative shape, followed by Japan, where Abenomics is boosting confidence. The eurozone and the UK remain mired in recessions made worse by tight monetary and fiscal policies. Among emerging economies, China could face a hard landing by late 2014 if critical structural reforms are postponed, and the other BRICs need to turn away from state capitalism. While other emerging markets in Asia and Latin America are showing more dynamism than the BRICs, their strength will not be enough to turn the global tide.

Note he makes a distinction between the real economy and the financial markets.

They are not the same, you know. They are interdependent, of course. But when the financial markets collapse there will always be a real economy.